WASHINGTON (AP) — Arizona voters approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion access up to fetal viability. Though there’s no defined time frame for viability, doctors say it’s sometime after 21 weeks. It’s a major win for abortion-rights supporters in the presidential battleground state who sought to expand access beyond 15 weeks. The citizen-led initiative far outpaced the opposition campaign in fundraising. Earlier this year, the Arizona Supreme Court allowed the enforcement of an 1864 law banning nearly all abortions, but then the Legislature quickly repealed it. The Associated Press declared the measure approved at 3:31 a.m. EST Wednesday.
الوسم: race
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AP Race Call: Nevada voters approve constitutional amendment enshrining abortion rights
WASHINGTON (AP) — A ballot question to enshrine Nevada’s abortion rights in the state constitution received its first nod of approval from voters. Voters must also approve the ballot question in 2026 in order to amend the state constitution. The political action committee Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom organized the ballot initiative and gathered enough signatures to put the question before voters. Although a 1990 state law makes abortion available up to 24 weeks of pregnancy, supporters in Nevada and elsewhere have been pressing to strengthen abortion access after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. The Associated Press declared that the question was approved at 3:21 a.m. EST Wednesday.
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AP Race Call: Democrat Shomari Figures elected to US House in Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District
WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrat Shomari Figures won election to a U.S. House seat representing Alabama on Thursday. Republican Rep. Barry Moore, who currently represents the district, is running in the neighboring 1st District after a federal court ordered Alabama to draw a new congressional district that ensured Black residents’ voting power. That decision also brought more voters who previously supported Democrat Joe Biden into the 2nd District, making it a top target for his party. Figures, a native of Mobile, previously worked for the Obama administration.
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Why AP called the Texas Senate race for Ted Cruz
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Associated Press declared that Republican Sen. Ted Cruz successfully defended his seat against Democratic Rep. Colin Allred based on the incumbent’s competitive showing in the state’s large population centers, bolstered by his overwhelming leads in more conservative rural areas across the state.
Cruz’s victory, which the AP declared at 11:39 p.m. ET, blocked a possible path in which Democrats might have retained control of the Senate by offsetting possible losses by vulnerable Democratic incumbents in other parts of the country.
The AP only declares a winner once it can determine that a trailing candidate can’t close the gap and overtake the vote leader.
CANDIDATES: Cruz (R) vs. Allred (D) vs. Ted Brown (Libertarian)
WINNER: Cruz (R)
POLL CLOSING TIME: 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. ET, depending on the part of the state
ABOUT THE RACE:
Facing their most difficult Senate map in years, Democrats looked to the Cruz-Allred matchup as one of their only chances to possibly defeat a Republican incumbent and offset an expected loss in West Virginia and highly vulnerable seats in Montana, Ohio and elsewhere. Cruz first won this seat by a 16-point margin in 2012, when he ran to replace 20-year Republican incumbent Kay Bailey Hutchison. He faced a much tougher contest in 2018, when then-Rep. Beto O’Rourke gained national attention for coming within 3 percentage points of defeating Cruz.
Allred, a former NFL linebacker and civil rights attorney, represents the Dallas-area 32nd Congressional District. He defeated 11-term Republican U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions in 2018. Sessions returned to Congress in 2021.
Allred has slightly outspent Cruz for the cycle, with each spending about $77 million on the race as of mid-October. Cruz entered the final stretch of the campaign with a $9.6 million to $2.5 million cash advantage.
Texas was once a heavily Democratic state, but Republicans have dominated statewide politics since the 1990s. A Democrat hasn’t held a U.S. Senate seat in more than 30 years. In more recent elections, Democratic candidates tend to perform best in the population centers of Dallas, Harris (Houston), Travis (Austin), Bexar (San Antonio) and El Paso counties, as well as along the southernmost border with Mexico. Republicans won by large margins across most of the state, as well as the more competitive counties surrounding Dallas and Houston.
WHY AP CALLED THE RACE:
At the time the AP called the race, Cruz led Allred in the statewide vote by more than 10 points with about 76% of the vote counted from almost every county. The incumbent posted big leads in traditionally Republican areas in the east and in the plains regions that make up much of the state. But he also stayed competitive with Allred in both the Democratic population centers of the Dallas/Ft. Worth and Houston areas.
Cruz was outperforming Trump’s 2020 share of the vote in those areas and narrowed the Democrats’ traditional advantage there. He was trailing Allred by about 4 percentage points in the area, while Trump trailed Democrat Joe Biden in those areas by between 8 and 9 percentage points in 2020.
Allred also underperformed in almost all of the state’s most populous counties compared to O’Rourke in his 2018 run against Cruz. He was slightly trailing O’Rourke’s performance in Harris (home of Houston), Dallas, Travis (home of Austin) and Bexar (home of San Antonio) counties but was far behind in O’Rourke’s home county of El Paso by 15 percentage points.
In order to overtake Cruz’s statewide lead, Allred would have needed to win the remaining untabulated ballots by more than 30 percentage points over Cruz, but he was not performing at near that level in the areas where the most outstanding votes remained.
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Learn more about how and why the AP declares winners in U.S. elections at Explaining Election 2024, a series from The Associated Press aimed at helping make sense of the American democracy. The AP receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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AP Race Call: Nebraska voters approve constitutional amendment enshrining 12-week abortion ban
WASHINGTON (AP) — Nebraska voters approved a ballot measure to write the state’s current 12-week abortion ban into the state constitution. It also allows for a stricter ban to be imposed. The abortion restriction measure was one of two competing abortion measures to appear on the ballot. The other measure would enshrine in the Nebraska Constitution the right to have an abortion until viability, or later to protect the health of the pregnant woman. Though there’s no defined time frame for viability, doctors say it’s sometime after 21 weeks. Nebraska is the first state to carry competing abortion amendments on the same ballot since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, which ended a national right to abortion. The Associated Press declared the initiative was approved at 1:02 a.m. EST Wednesday.
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Why AP called the Ohio Senate race for Bernie Moreno
WASHINGTON (AP) — Three-term Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown didn’t do as well in Ohio’s population-dense metro regions as he had in the past, and that performance — in areas he needed to overcome the state’s increasingly conservative bent — helped propel former car salesman Bernie Moreno to victory.
Moreno won after securing a 4 percentage-point lead in the Senate race, ousting Brown, who was the last in his party elected statewide in what was once a premier electoral battleground.
Moreno was narrowly leading in the Cincinnati-Dayton area when the race was called, while Brown needed a better performance in the Cleveland and Columbus regions, even though he led in those areas.
Brown would have needed to notch 71.9% of the remaining ballots left to be counted when The Associated Press called the race for Moreno at 11:28 p.m. — a threshold he wasn’t clearing in any of the counties in the state.
CANDIDATES: Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, Bernie Moreno
WINNER: Moreno
POLL CLOSING TIME: 7:30 p.m. ET
ABOUT THE RACE:
The phrase “as Ohio goes, so goes the nation” was once a widely accepted bit of conventional wisdom that underscored the true swing nature of a perennial presidential battleground state. No longer.
Over the past decade, the Midwestern state, once a reliable barometer of how the country at large would vote, has become a Republican stronghold. Brown was the lone exception. With a gravelly voice and a populist outlook, Brown somehow hung on and is the sole Democrat to still hold statewide elected office.
Now, however, he lost the political fight of his life against the wealthy, Trump-backed Moreno. The race was the most expensive Senate race this election cycle, with a tab that surpassed $400 million — with much of it coming from Republican-aligned groups that supported Moreno.
Brown appeared to understand the gravity. In July, he called on then-presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden to drop out of the race a month after his shaky debate performance against Trump. He endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace Biden on the ticket but skipped the Democratic National Convention in August. Moreno accused Brown of distancing himself from Harris, which the senator’s campaign dismissed.
But Moreno was not without his own liabilities. He was criticized by fellow Republicans, including former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, for making tone-deaf comments about abortion — suggesting that it was “crazy” for women past the age of 50 to care about the issue because “I don’t think that’s an issue for you.’”
WHY AP CALLED THE RACE: The AP declared Moreno the winner with a nearly 5-point lead over Brown with over 90% of the estimated vote in. He was narrowly leading in the population-dense Cincinnati-Dayton area, which Brown won in 2018. Meanwhile, Brown’s margins in Democratic strongholds in Cleveland and Columbus weren’t as large as they were in 2018. Moreno also led in areas that were most closely divided in the 2020 presidential race.
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Learn more about how and why the AP declares winners in U.S. elections at Explaining Election 2024, a series from The Associated Press aimed at helping make sense of the American democracy. The AP receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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AP Race Call: Missouri voters approve constitutional amendment enshrining abortion rights
WASHINGTON (AP) — Missouri voters approved a measure on Tuesday that enshrines abortion rights in the state constitution and replaces a near-total ban on the procedure. The measure guarantees a person’s right to get an abortion and make other reproductive health decisions. It opens the door to legal challenges of a ban on most abortions that took effect immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. The measure made the ballot after an intense legal fight led by anti-abortion advocates who sought to prevent a vote.
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AP Race Call: Kamala Harris wins Washington
Vice President Kamala Harris won Washington’s 12 electoral votes on Tuesday, besting former President Donald Trump in a state where he is not popular. -
Josh Stein beats Mark Robinson in North Carolina governor’s race | US elections 2024
North Carolina voters have once again given its governor’s mansion to a Democrat, electing the attorney general, Josh Stein, over the embattled lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson, in a race defined by the extreme rhetoric and controversies surrounding the Republican candidate.
Stein’s victory gives North Carolina its first Jewish governor. It also marks a repudiation of Robinson, the divisive figure who drew attention for stunning public comments about women, the LGBTQ+ community and racial minorities both before and during his time in office, Stein said.
“Tonight, we came together to resoundingly embrace a vision that is optimistic, forward-looking, and welcoming,” Stein said on X. “I couldn’t have done this without each of you.”
Stein’s campaign focused on his record combating opioids as attorney general, his commitment to abortion rights, preventing Republican legislators from exercising unchecked power, and not being Robinson.
At his election watch party, Robinson said: “It’s not about the lies. It’s not about the half-truths. It’s about the people who believe in you … I stand here strong and proud – glad to have run a race that was upright and decent.”
Republican leaders and financial donors largely abandoned Robinson after a CNN investigative report linked him to an online persona in which he described himself as a “black NAZI!”, extolled the virtues of chattel slavery and engaged in grotesque sexual commentary on a pornographic chat board. Robinson denied that the “minisoldr” profile was his, and has filed suit against CNN and others linked to the story.
But the CNN report was only the loudest in a line of controversies that dogged Robinson throughout the campaign. Robinson has, among many other inflammatory comments, referred to homosexuality and transgender identity as “filth”, suggested he would support returning to a time when women did not have the right to vote, and mocked survivors of the Parkland school shooting, calling them “spoiled little bastards”.
Speaking at Lake church in the eastern North Carolina town of White Lake on the Fourth of July, Robinson said “some folks need killing” while describing his posture toward people he perceives as America’s enemies, an assortment in his speech that ranged from “people who have evil intent” to “socialists” and “communists”, a term he regularly assigns to Democrats.
Donald Trump had endorsed Robinson, calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids” at a rally in March. By October, as observers speculated whether Robinson’s political toxicity could cost Republicans the state in the presidential race, Trump had barred him from appearing together in public. Asked if he would withdraw his endorsement, Trump said: “I’m not familiar with the race. I haven’t seen it.”
Though North Carolina’s legislature has a Republican supermajority and a majority of its statewide elected officials are Republicans, Robinson never held a polling lead and lost by the widest margin of any Republican candidate for the office in 20 years. A final tally has not yet been posted, but Robinson ran significantly behind Trump in votes, an indication that Republican swing voters abandoned him.
Robinson joins a long line of failed Republican campaigns in what remains a fundamentally conservative state. In the past 32 years, only two Republicans have won the governorship: Pat McCrory, who served from 2013 to 2017, and Jim Martin, who served from 1985 to 1993. The current governor, Roy Cooper, a Democrat, is term limited.
Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage
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AP Race Call: Kamala Harris wins the District of Columbia
Vice President Kamala Harris won the District of Columbia on Tuesday, securing the capital’s three electoral votes.